New computer chip architectures may be developed to increase processing speed and accuracy. In developing a chip architecture, there may be a tradeoff between the speed of normal execution and exception handling. For example, exception handling may be done in hardware, micro-code, or a combination thereof. Additionally, depending on where conversion between different data types takes place, there may be a single set of architectural registers or a multiplicity. Different architectures to date have taken different approaches.
There are applications in which the same operation is often performed repeatedly over a series of values. Parallel processing has been developed to operate on multiple data sets simultaneously. Such processors may use packed data formats and SIMD (single instruction-stream, multiple data-stream) instruction sets.